


any amount of sense

by preromantics



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Or: Five times people thought Sherlock and John were dating, and one time they didn't.) Wherein John and Sherlock have been dating for a long time, almost as long as it takes to figure out that they are. <i>John only slightly regrets his simple pleasure at Sherlock’s scarf when he spots Sally’s sidelong glance at him, one eyebrow raised at his scarf in -- completely wrong -- knowing.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	any amount of sense

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ 08/25/2010.

**one.**

The crime scene, as far as crime scenes go, is nothing shocking. John doesn’t even stop to re-evaluate his own sanity as he trails Sherlock and Lestrade up a flight of stairs. He doesn’t look at the family photographs lining the wall, even, but he notices Sherlock’s quick, and probably thorough, glances at them all as they go up.

The house is cold, seemingly un-lived in for a least a few days, and John takes a moment as they hit the landing and turn off toward an attic ladder to appreciate the warm scarf around his neck. (Sherlock had thrown it towards him when they entered Lestrade’s car -- no time for a cab, apparently -- offering a muttered, “Mrs. Hudson,” by way of explanation, like anyone worrying about John was an inconvenience. To him, it probably was. It was one of Sherlock’s scarves, although John had only seen him wear it once, and it smelled equally of formaldehyde and the soap in their shower.)

John only slightly regrets his simple pleasure at Sherlock’s scarf when he spots Sally’s sidelong glance at him, one eyebrow raised at his scarf in -- completely wrong -- knowing.

“Nice scarf,” she says, joining their group to follow Sherlock’s shimmy up the ladder in front of them.

“Thanks,” John says, reasonably, without much inflection.

“The freak been rubbing off on --”

“Donovan,” Lestrade says, a tired-sounding warning before he ascends the ladder after Sherlock.

“In more ways than one,” Sally finishes, her voice low and smile at John still in place.

John is happy he missed her full sentence, and doesn’t give in to the urge to adjust the scarf around his neck with Sally watching; the attic is bound to be colder than the house in general, and knowing Sherlock they won’t be there long anyway. Hopefully.

He grabs a rung wrong on the way up the ladder, though, by accident, and the face of his watch, one he’s had for years, shatters. Sally doesn’t laugh from behind him, for which he is grateful, but Sherlock’s head shows up from the floor above, bent and looking down at him.

“Your watch?” he asks, face moving strangely upside-down.

John doesn’t answer him, he just pulls himself all the way into the -- surprisingly spacious -- attic room, catching the way Sherlock eyes his wrist, anyway.

  
 **two.**

Sherlock stands in the middle of the room and observes for a few minutes. John watches a woman take pictures of the corpse lying in the middle of the floor.

“Did you have sex in your car last night?” Sherlock asks, out of the blue. He’s turned toward Lestrade when John looks, his words falling right in the middle of the busy working silence of the room.

John doesn’t pretend to be surprised; he’s really not. He does, however, keep his quiet amusement at the way Lestrade blanches to himself. Sherlock would nag him about it after.

“I --” Lestrade says, faltering. He seems to puff up, straighten his shoulders out, aware just as John, and surely Sherlock, of the attention the room has given them. “No,” Lestrade says, “Sherlock, of course not. That’s not something you --”

Sherlock shrugs, easily, cutting him off. “I noticed a few fresh stains,” he says. “Merely curious. Anyway.”

“Noticed,” Lestrade repeats, “Curious. Of course you --”

John watches as Sherlock’s attention to the subject wanes, watches the change in his expression as pieces of whatever he had been working through while looking around the room puzzle together in his mind.

“Ah,” Sherlock says, effectively cutting off Lestrade’s train of thought, putting in motion the bits of movement around them as he strides across the room, most of the officers and forensics team resuming their work in a slow sort of way, trying to show they weren’t paying rapt attention to the affairs of their ID.

“What is it?” John asks, since no one else seems ready to. Sherlock is crouched down at the wall, running two of his gloved fingers across a bulging crack.

Lestrade steps up, observing Sherlock’s motions. “That sort of crack is normal for a house this age,” he says, and John catches Sally rolling her eyes in the corner; even she knows not to tell Sherlock obvious things. Lestrade is off his game.

Sherlock looks up at Lestrade fleetingly. “Yes, obviously,” he says, more than John expected.

After another moment (wherein most the room’s attention returns to Sherlock and Lestrade again, this time with more obvious, un-guarded interest,) Sherlock stands.

“The plaster is new,” Sherlock says, rubbing his two gloved fingers together. “Maybe two days, a little less. Dried with a -- I’d say some sort of blow torch, so it wouldn’t look fresh. Where it looks darker, those are gas burns, not age. The crack itself is not from the house, the direction is completely separate from any other settling cracks around the room.”

“So you think the person who killed --” Lestrade starts, but Sherlock shakes his head, once.

“This isn’t the work of our killer,” Sherlock says. (John grins to himself, a bit. Sherlock tends to get possessive over cases, and he’s already far more interested in this case than he’s letting anyone else on to.)

Sherlock doesn’t answer the question blanketing the room, though, doesn’t hint at who he might be referring to -- he just looks around the room, as if any of the people gathered will know, as if they could follow his train of thought. John watches his face, carefully, waiting for the hint of exasperation he knows will come; a flare of nostrils, a raise of his eyebrows, a blatant, if not rare, roll of his eyes.

“Our victim!” Sherlock enthuses, meeting Lestrade’s stare with a pleased one. Sherlock sighs. “The killer has a pattern, you see? He leaves fair warning that he’s coming, but all of our murders up until now have been too scared to admit to the police what they’d done to also seek protection from their death. It’s a classic scenario.”

“Okay,” Lestrade says, into Sherlock’s pause. John waits for Sherlock to continue, only briefly amused at how pleased Sherlock seems to be at how the killer is conforming to one of his favorite serial killing patterns -- not that Sherlock has a list of his favorite patterns of serial killers, at least, not one that’s written down and pinned to their fridge, of that John is sure, but John is also reasonably sure he at least has some sort of run-down of the topic in his mind.

“He’s a watchmaker,” Sherlock continues, this time bending back to the crack, pressing down on the plaster covering it, where the drywall starts to give and split under the pressure of his fingers. “His workshop is meticulously organized, his entire life is accounted for -- life insurance, bills, his wife, what have you. He didn’t go to the police, but he knew enough to leave something behind.”

“Did he?” Lestrade asks, “Sherlock, I’m not sure the common --”

“Ah,” Sherlock says, again. He stands quickly and turns to John. “John, do you remember that place we had our dinner date the other night?”

“Of course,” John says, quickly, before it occurs to him that Sherlock used the word ‘date’, and no matter the context Sherlock meant, the rest of the room (paying obvious attention now) will understand it differently. “Not a date like that,” he amends, to the room at large. Not one of them seems to notice.

Sherlock paces again, without explaining himself. John stays standing in his spot and watches, patiently.

“Open the wall up and call me -- no, actually, just text John, we’ll be out -- and let us know what you find,” Sherlock says, in the general direction of absolutely no one, although John is certain that Lestrade understands. John doesn’t even begin to protest at the horrible misuse of his phone anymore, although more than once he’s found himself considering getting a second line to carry around just for Sherlock-related purposes. (Considering things on Sherlock’s behalf has become a daily occurrence; John tries not to think about it too much.)

He follows Sherlock back down the ladder, sharing a grin with Lestrade as his head goes down, something they’ve made a sort of habit when Sherlock is around.

“Where are we --” John starts, cutting himself short when they exit the house. He rarely bothers asking anymore. Sherlock just throws him a look, eyes bright and still excited with the thrilling turn of events for the day. (John had woken up to Sherlock in the living room, sitting under the window cross-legged, trying to balance his violin bow on one finger -- either as some sort of physics experiment or a random unproductive activity to keep him from being bored that he wouldn’t admit to. John had shrugged it off and made them both tea. So, the day had definitely taken an upturn.)

It was easy enough to follow Sherlock into a cab, too -- sliding into a backseat was practically muscle memory, now.

 **three.**

Molly is working when Sherlock pushes open the door, which John is grateful for. It always takes much less time and definitely much less explanation when Sherlock wants something in or from the morgue if Molly is there.

Even so, Sherlock is in more of a rush than usual.

“I just need to see the hands,” Sherlock says, up in Molly’s space in a way that John can see she isn’t sure about -- he knows the feeling. Although she probably tends more towards the reluctant enjoyment of Sherlock pressed nearly up against her to grab something off a shelf, rather than the reluctant acceptance of presence that John usually feels. (He’s not sure what he feels the other times, and he’d rather not think about it.)

“If you have a few fingers lying around that no one needs,” Sherlock adds, watching as Molly unzips the body bag on the table, “I could use those too.”

John watches with amusement as Molly’s face moves over several expressions. Sherlock must notice, too, because he shrugs. “It’s not as if they’re using them, or they’ll be missed,” he says, which John doesn’t really think helps.

John stays back while Sherlock does various things to the hand in front of him. He’s noticeably hurried, though.

“In a rush?” Molly asks, although it comes out awkwardly, where she’d probably been intending for light.

Sherlock spares her a glance. “Yes,” he says. “John and I have dinner reservations across the other side of London. I’d rather not cut it close.”

Which is -- news to John. Molly takes a step back from where she’d been standing over Sherlock to watch him work, and she glances over at John with something John can’t figure out, almost like a bit of guilt, or something apologetic.

It takes until Sherlock steps away from the corpse with finality for John to realize what Molly was thinking. “We’ll be going,” Sherlock says, just as John opens his mouth to reassure Molly that they are just going as -- whatever they are.

“Come on, John,” Sherlock says, striding past him. He pauses at the door and John has to stop himself quickly, jarringly, to not run into Sherlock’s back. “Molly, remember those fingers, if you can. You can always drop a few off with Mrs. Hudson. Just -- I wouldn’t tell her what you’re dropping off.”

He doesn’t stay to hear Molly’s answer, and John follows him out the door and back up the stairs, shaking his head.

  
 **four.**

John wakes up to a quiet apartment, which is generally a rare ouccurance, and sometimes a cause for concern. When he makes it to the couch, however, he decides not to worry; a quiet morning could be a blessing, as long as Sherlock isn’t in dire trouble somewhere.

He sets up with his laptop, thinking about writing a new piece on the blog. He’s not entirely sure what he’d write about, though -- they are in the middle of a case, so there isn’t much to report. He figures he’d end up writing about how everyone seems to always  _assume_  around he and Sherlock, and how he’s started to notice with increasing frequency -- but the more John thinks of that, the more he starts to psychoanalyze himself, and that never goes well.

John closes his laptop and grabs a book from the stack on the table behind him, one of Sherlock’s, a reference book on the solar system that John had brought home and left in the kitchen, figuring Sherlock would pick it up on his own time when he got to it. (The next day it was on the couch, open on it’s spine half-way through, so John figured Sherlock had appreciated the sentiment, even if he wasn’t very good at saying thank-you.)

He hears Sherlock coming up the stairs before the door opens, and he doesn’t look up from his page on supernovas until Sherlock clears his throat.

“I just got a massage,” Sherlock says, and with an undertone of hesitation that John picks up easily, a product of listening to Sherlock think out loud for months.

“A massage,” John repeats, because, of all the things for Sherlock to go out to do, well, getting a massage wasn’t high on any list of Sherlock-related things that John had tucked away in his head. And that wasn’t even going into the vague theories John had about Sherlock and touching.

“Research,” Sherlock says. He walks over to the couch after shrugging off his coat, and John puts his book down on the table, sitting up to accommodate him. “I needed to know how a masseuses hands looked, how the joints were accustomed to moving,” he elaborates.

John watches as Sherlock flexes his own fingers in front of himself. “Here,” Sherlock says, “turn around.”

After only a moment’s hesitance -- it’s better to just go with whatever Sherlock asks, as long as it’s not an immediate life threat -- John turns on the couch, back to Sherlock on an angle. After a moment, Sherlock’s hands move to rest on his shoulders, there for a just a second before they move, up to his neck, his thumbs digging into the knot on the back of his neck.

“You’re stressed,” Sherlock observes, rolling his thumbs and -- really, the last and only time John got a massage was in rehab after getting wounded in the war, and Sherlock is unnaturally good, and he  _is_  stressed, but --

John doesn’t mention that Sherlock is the source of most of his stress on a daily basis. He assumes it’s a fact that Sherlock knows.

Sherlock’s rhythm on his neck falters periodically, and the pressure of his fingers changes, gets taken away entirely as Sherlock moves, to, John assumes, study his own hands. Occasionally he makes little noises of surprise or recognition; John’s almost surprised he’s not taking notes, and he laughs at the thought, the back of his neck warm.

“What?” Sherlock asks, mouth entirely too close to John’s ear, knees pressing knobby into his lower back.

“Nothing,” John says, although he knows -- even when Sherlock falls back into silence, his hands moving down his shoulders gradually, the most they’ve ever touched outside a hostage or near-death situation -- Sherlock will ask him what he was thinking at some other odd point during the day.

John lets himself relax back into Sherlock’s hands, relaxation a luxury he barely affords himself, while Sherlock experiments on him. It’s enough that he barely notices Mrs. Hudson coming up the stairs, doesn’t think to move as she starts to speak.

“Sherlock,” she calls, at least halfway up now, “a nice girl named Molly dropped this bag off for you last night, and I -- oh.”

John notes the exact moment she gets to the still-open doorway. Mrs. Hudson laughs, small and knowingly, (like everyone else, John also notes,) and sets the bag down on the floor by the door. “I’m going to the grocers later,” she says, backing up already, “let me know later if I can pick you up anything.”

“Thanks,” Sherlock calls after her, not phased at all, hands still working deftly on John’s neck. John doesn’t bother explaining.

“Oh -- I didn’t even, yes, of course --” Sherlock says, suddenly, and his weight by John’s back and the press of his hands disappears. He’s at the door in John’s line of sight before John can even roll his shoulders back, testing.

“We’ve got to go out,” Sherlock says, already wrapping his scarf around his neck -- the one John had worn just the day before -- with a long twist of finality.

“I have a shift in a half hour,” John says, although he’s entirely curious about Sherlock’s unspoken revelation. It might even come out reluctantly, but he’s not entirely sure.

“Ah,” Sherlock says; for a second John feels like he hears the reluctance in his own voice in Sherlock’s, as well.

“Meet for dinner?” John offers, because they usually end up doing that, anyway.

“It’s a date,” Sherlock says, easily, and John listens to his steps all the way down the stairs. He’s not entirely sure it’s  _not_  a date, really.

  
 **five.**

Sarah is at the front desk when John gets in, fifteen minutes early for his shift. They still -- talk, although John tries to skirt around her and busy himself with patients when he’s able. Nothing dramatic had happened between them, but it had been months since they’d pursued anything serious. John was always busy with Sherlock and -- well, Sherlock and their cases generally took up most the time he didn’t spend working or trying to sleep or trying to keep up his blog.

There is no one else at the desk, though, and he catches her eyes, so he goes over, one hand raised in greeting.

“How’s the lineup?” he asks, peering over at the clipboard in front of her.

“Not bad at all,” she says, smiling easy at him. They stand where they are, on opposite sides of the desk for a few minutes, and John opens his mouth to speak just as she does.

“No,” he says, when she falters, “go ahead.”

“I was just going to invite you round to a housewarming party I’m having tonight,” Sarah says, ending with a light laugh. “A few friends and neighbors, you know.”

“I didn’t know you’d moved,” John says, and then -- well. “I can’t, though, Sarah. Sorry.”

“That’s fine, of course,” Sarah says. Her friendly smile doesn’t dissipate but she shuffles the papers on her clipboard.

“It’s just that I’ve got dinner with Sherlock, or I’d --” John starts.

“Oh,” Sarah says, “that’s fine, of course you do. Have a really nice time.”

Someone gets in line behind John at the desk, so he steps back, clears his throat. “I will, yeah,” he says, because he always does, and Sarah just keeps smiling her pretty, friendly smile at him.

John walks towards his on-shift office to set his coat down and starts internally listing all the things that make dinner with Sherlock, or movies with Sherlock, or lunch, or walks through parks at midnight with Sherlock, not dates.

By the time he leaves his shift to go meet Sherlock at the restaurant they’d decided on over the course of the day via intermittent texts, John only comes up with one reason he doesn’t go on dates Sherlock: that Sherlock doesn’t consider them dates. It’s a reason with a lot of faults -- what if he does? -- but it’s a valid reason just the same. Really.

  
 **and --**

Sherlock is waiting outside the little Italian restaurant they’d agreed on when John gets there, his hands in his pockets, like they might be cold under his ever-present gloves.

“On time, good,” Sherlock says, “you’ll never believe what I did today.”

John considers the fact that he probably won’t; it is Sherlock, after all. He also looks down for the time on his wrist, before forgetting about his broken watch from the day before.

“So -- this is a date,” John says, somewhat more bluntly than he’d intended, after they’ve sat down and the waiter’s set their bread down on the table and walked away. It’s still a question, though. Sherlock pauses, his hand on the top of his menu, half-slid off the table.

“A good observation,” Sherlock offers. “Pass me the bread?”

“No,” John says, and Sherlock raises an eyebrow at that. John shakes his head. “Not the bread,” he says, passing the basket over, “I meant -- this is a date.” He emphasises the word.

Sherlock carefully tears off a piece of bread so he only gets one slice with none of the crust from the other pieces. “I don’t date,” he says, slowly, and John maybe wraps his hands around the arms of his chair involuntarily. Sherlock glances at him. “But, yes, it is.”

“Oh,” John says. Sherlock tears another piece of bread off and sets it on John’s plate. “Okay.”

“Good,” Sherlock says. “I was wondering when we’d settle that.”

John laughs, mostly to himself, and Sherlock glances up at him from his bread with a comfortable smile. A sort of smile, John realizes, he’s only ever seen Sherlock use around him.

“Anyway,” Sherlock says, “I have to tell you what I found out today.”

Sherlock doesn’t seem surprised when Mycroft walks into the restaurant a few minutes later. John does note, however, the way his face tenses up, how his shoulders straighten just minutely. He hadn’t even realized Sherlock was so relaxed. John is nowhere near relaxed; he hasn’t been on a romantic dinner date since his last with Sarah, one that ended rather anti-climatically -- (“Literally or figuratively?” Sherlock had asked after, with one eyebrow raised. John hadn’t answered him.) -- let alone a date with Sherlock.

“I thought you weren’t fond of this place,” Mycroft says, pulling a chair over from another table to sit with them, no pretense. John winces at the way it drags along the floor.

“You’re not?” John asks, regretting suggesting they eat here. At least, he was mildly certain he’d been the one to text about this one.

Sherlock looks away from Mycroft, the corner of his lip turning up. “I wasn’t, before.” he says. “Upon re-evaluation, though, I’ve decided it depends on the company of my table. Up until now I was enjoying it.”

“No matter,” Mycroft says, as if Sherlock’s sudden admittance to enjoying something other than a good murder mystery has any effect on him -- it certainly has an effect on John, although he’s not ready to figure out just what sort of effect it is, warm up his spine and all. “I have an inquiry.”

“Something your surveillance couldn’t answer?” Sherlock asks, a little bitingly, even for him.

“Could it wait?” John asks, ignoring the way Mycroft and Sherlock are staring at each other, like whoever blinks first wins some sort of upper hand. Which, he realizes, is probably exactly what they are doing.

“Until?” Mycroft asks, without looking away from Sherlock. He seems amused, of course.

“Until after our date,” John says, a little harsher than he means to.

“Or until never,” Sherlock adds, looking away from Mycroft. “You’ve always been big on social norms, Mycroft. I remember you excelling in the etiquette classes mum had us in. Don’t you know better than to interrupt a date?”

“You took etiquette classes?” John asks, since it’s the first thing that sticks with him. He can’t imagine Sherlock ever taking classes in social etiquette, not with the way he treats, well, everyone he doesn’t need something from. John doesn’t even re-think his vocal reaffirmation that he and Sherlock are on a date.

“You’re really on a date?” Mycroft asks, sidetracked and seemingly surprised, in the best way he can be.

“You didn’t notice?” Sherlock asks, back, shaking his head. “I always gave your automatic assumption of your own intelligence all the benefit of doubt I could, but --”

“You both always have dinner like this,” Myrcoft says, easily cutting off what John is sure would have been an interesting bit of sibling banter on Sherlock’s part. He does have a somewhat valid point. “I wasn’t aware the circumstances had, well, changed.”

Good lord, everyone really did think they were dating.

“They’ve changed,” John says, with as much finality as he can muster.

Mycroft stands and Sherlock sits back in his chair. “I’ll stop by first thing tomorrow,” he says.

“Please don’t,” Sherlock says. When Mycroft leaves, Sherlock looks back at John. He seems -- faintly amused, if John isn’t mistaken.

“To be clear,” John says, leveling Sherlock’s amusement with a steady gaze, “this is our first -- first date.”

“Is it?” Sherlock asks. He taps his fork once on the side of his bread plate, grinning. “I guess I’ll have to wait on giving you our anniversary gift, then.” He takes a medium sized box out of the coat hanging on the back of his chair and sets it on the table.

“Anniversary?” John asks, looking at the way the light of the candle on their table reflects off the silver ribbon tied around it. At one time, the bouncing light, the glaring reds and oranges of it, would have reminded him of a battlefield at night, of gunfire. It would have made him momentarily cold, and his therapist would have wanted to talk about it for hours.

“Well,” Sherlock says, “it’s a year tomorrow. I thought a day early wouldn’t hurt, though, seeing as we’re bound to get caught up in the case after tonight.”

“A year,” John repeats. Right.

“I could save it for next year,” Sherlock says, looking out the window behind John for a second before looking straight at him. “But, as far as I know, I think the second year anniversary gift is wood? Or glass, I forget, and this just wouldn’t go.”

John stares at him.

“One of those etiquette class things,” Sherlock offers, unhelpfully, “maybe you’re supposed to give china on the second? I can’t remember the order, it was all so useless.”

“We’re not married,” John says, when his brain catches up. It’s not like he’s checking -- he knows that much, but --

“Not yet,” Sherlock says, entirely too cheerful.

John breathes out and shakes his head. He grabs for the box, Sherlock’s fingers catching the back of his hand in a way that John doesn’t dwell on, but definitely feels. The ribbon slides off with a pull and the top of the box comes off with a pop. Inside is John’s old watch, the one he’d thought was irreparable. The second hand ticks easily around the face in a steady circle; the leather of the wristband is worn in the same places John remembers, desert dirt probably still embedded in the threads from where he’d worn it under all his gear during the war.

“I had it fixed for you,” Sherlock says, even though that much is obvious beyond the sort of obviousness that Sherlock tends to point out for John’s benefit. Or annoyance.

Sherlock’s fingers slide around John’s wrist easily when John wraps the watch around, and he fastens it deftly right over his pulse point, where the quickness of the beat probably gives him away entirely to Sherlock.

“It’s not much,” Sherlock adds, and he looks almost -- apprehensive. Expectant.

“It’s perfect,” John says, nowhere near a lie. The watch feels just the same around his wist, soft from wear, the cold metal of the back of the face warming slowly against his skin.

“The back is false,” Sherlock says, the corner of his mouth quirked up again, “it has a little bit of a powdered poison -- acts relatively fast when in combination with liquid. Saliva works in a pinch. In case you need it.”

John has no doubt he’ll need it in the future, following Sherlock around like he still does. (Will do, for the foreseeable future.) “Thank you,” he says, full of -- something, something that makes the warmth at the back of his spine from before grow.

Sherlock looks away, down at the candle on their table. “Really,” he says, “it was nothing.”

John butters the bread on his plate in silence, letting Sherlock study the flame for as long as he wants to.

“I was thinking,” Sherlock offers, when he finally looks up.

John sets down his bread. “Were you?” he asks, grinning just slightly.

Sherlock gives him a look, although, in John’s opinion, it fails utterly at conveying any malice or exasperation. “Never mind,” he says, “you’ll just have to find out when we get back home.” He takes a bite of his own bread quickly, but it doesn’t hide the mischievous sort of grin and look in his eyes that John notices -- the sort of look John usually associates with Sherlock finding something interesting to do to a corpse, or any look he gives when John heads towards the fridge, unknowing of whatever body part or experiment that lies within.

This look is slightly different, though, and John would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit looking forward to going back and finding out just what Sherlock was thinking. (Sherlock’s thinking nearly always led somewhere -- eventful.) “Alright,” John says.

Sherlock doesn’t hide the way he almost looks put-out that John didn’t bug him. John laughs, light. After a moment, Sherlock breathes out, laying down the menu he’d briefly opened and glanced over. “We should skip right to dessert,” he says.

He doesn’t say it in any particular manner, more like he’s already decided they aren’t going to eat real food, but John can’t help but be effected, just a little. “You’re a cheap date, Sherlock,” John says, easily enough.

“Does that mean you’re paying?” Sherlock asks, grinning, “Good. I was wondering how we’d settle that.”

John shakes his head, light. He orders the cobbler and Sherlock orders cheesecake, which surprises them both (although it seems to surprise John more, which only makes sense).

As John eats, he thinks about how everything seemed to make sense, even the parts that shouldn’t have: killing and watching people die, the places he endured in reality and his own head, before Sherlock came into his life a whole year ago. Now, things rarely make sense all at once, but when they do -- they seem to make a startling amount of sense: where something has gone missing to, who the murder is, and just how comfortable John is with spending many, many more years with Sherlock at his side.

Sherlock grins at him over his cheesecake, a bit of whipped cream on his upper lip, looking wholly and instantly enticing. And that’s -- that makes sense, too.


End file.
